| The machine said to have been used to produce the first clone of a human being goes on display in London on Wednesday amid continuing concerns of a giant hoax.
The Science Museum said that following Raelian cult claims last year to have created "Eve," the daughter of a 31-year-old American, it had borrowed one of the "embryonic cell fusion machines" developed by the cult's scientific arm, Clonaid.
Dr Emily Scott, who put together the museum's "Breakthrough or Hoax" exhibition, told Reuters: "It is not the museum's wish to add anything to Clonaid's claims. The setting in which we have the machine is quite sceptical."
She said Clonaid claimed its $9,000, "RMX 2010" machine was specially "optimised" for successful cloning but the museum did not have permission to take it apart to see how it differs from other machines used -- with very low success rates -- by animal cloning scientists.
"Cloning has a poor track record," the museum added in a statement. "Of the ten types of animal cloned so far, only six have produced live young using the technique that created Dolly the sheep."
The ethics of cloning have been hotly debated ever since Dolly, the sheep cloned from the genetic material of an adult sheep, was born in Scotland in 1997.
Mammals can be cloned by removing the nucleus from an egg cell and injecting in a nucleus from a normal adult cell to replace it. A machine such as the RMX 2010 gives an electric shock to the egg, forcing it to fuse with its new DNA contents.
The Raelian cult, which believes the human race was created by aliens, says that since the birth of the first human clone, another has been born and that a third, a Japanese, is expected later on Tuesday.
Scientists suspect a hoax as they have not been able to do genetic checks on any of the babies to verify the claims.
The exhibition explains how to check a would-be clone's credentials and investigates how a human clone would compare with its DNA donor on looks and personality.
Visitors can also see the machine used to create Dolly the sheep. | |
